A trombonist, singer, bandleader, composer and arranger, he collaborated with Rubén Blades on “Siembra,” a 1978 release that became one of the top-selling salsa albums of all time.

President Trump said his planned meeting with President Xi Jinping would be a grand display, but tensions over trade and defense could dampen the mood.

Norway, led by the cross-country skiing sensation Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo, topped the medal table for the fourth straight Winter Games.

Team Mirai, a political party founded by software engineers, won 11 seats in Japan’s legislature by promising chatbots, self-driving buses and high-tech jobs.

The Kremlin’s sabotage campaign against European allies of Ukraine has been escalating. It needs people like Aleksei Kolosovsky, 42, to carry it out.

The blizzard warnings are the first since 2017 for New York City. Forecasters said the city is expected to get up to 18 inches of snow, with two feet possible.

"More than four decades after a teenager was murdered in California, DNA found on a discarded cigarette has helped authorities catch her killer," reports CNN: Sarah Geer, 13, was last seen leaving her friend's houseï in Cloverdale, California, on the evening of May 23, 1982. The next morning, a firefighter walking home from work found her body, the Sonoma County District Attorney's Office said in a news release... Her death was ruled a homicide, but due to the "limited forensic science of the day," no suspect was identified and the case went cold for decades, prosecutors said. Nearly 44 years after Sarah's murder, a jury found James Unick, 64, guilty of killing her on February 13. It would have been the victim's 57th birthday, the Sonoma County District Attorney's Office told CNN. Genetic genealogy, which combines DNA evidence and traditional genealogy, helped match Unick's DNA from a cigarette butt to DNA found on Sarah's clothing, according to prosecutors... [The Cloverdale Police Department] said it had been in communication with a private investigation firm in late 2019 and had partnered with them in hopes the firm could revisit the case's evidence "with the latest technological advancements in cold case work...." "The FBI, with its access to familial genealogical databases, concluded that the source of the DNA evidence collected from Sarah belonged to one of four brothers, including James Unick," prosecutors said. Once investigators narrowed down the list of suspects to the four Unick brothers, the FBI "conducted surveillance of the defendant and collected a discarded cigarette that he had been smoking," prosecutors said. A DNA analysis of the cigarette confirmed James Unick's DNA matched the 2003 profile, along with other DNA samples collected from Sarah's clothing the day she was killed. In a statement, the county's district attorney "While 44 years is too long to wait, justice has finally been served..." And the article points out that "In 2018, genetic genealogy led to the arrest of the Golden State Killer, and it has recently helped solve several other cold cases, including a 1974 murder in Wisconsin and a 1988 murder in Washington."

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Workers at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital voted for a contract with raises and layoff protections, meaning more than 4,000 nurses will return.

A major winter storm on Sunday and Monday is expected to bring delays and cancellations across much of the Northeast.

The president yanked his endorsement of Representative Jeff Hurd of Colorado, imperiling Republicans’ chances of holding onto his seat as they brace for midterm losses.

The consumer movement Stop Killing Games "has come a long way in the two years since YouTuber Ross Scott got mad about Ubisoft's destruction of The Crew in 2024," writes the gaming news site PC Gamer. "The short version is, he won: 1.3 million people signed the group's petition, mandating its consideration by the European Union, and while Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot reminded us all that nothing is forever, his company promised to never do something like that again." (And Ubisoft has since updated The Crew 2 with an offline mode, according to Engadget.) "But it looks like even bigger things are in store," PC Gamer wrote Thursday, "as Scott announced today that Stop Killing Games is launching two official NGOs, one in the EU and the other in the US." An NGO — that's non-governmental organization — is, very generally speaking, an organization that pursues particular goals, typically but not exclusively political, and that may be funded partially or fully by governments, but is not actually part of any government. It's a big tent: Well-known NGOs include Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, and CARE International... "If there's a lobbyist showing up again and again at the EU Commission, that might influence things," [Scott says in a video]. "This will also allow for more watchdog action. If you recall, I helped organize a multilingual site with easy to follow instructions for reporting on The Crew to consumer protection agencies. Well, maybe the NGO could set something like that up for every big shutdown where the game is destroyed in the future...." Scott said in the video that he doesn't have details, but the two NGOs are reportedly looking at establishing a "global movement" to give Stop Killing Games a presence in other regions. "According to Scott, these NGOs would allow for 'long-term counter lobbying' when publishers end support for certain video games," Engadget reports" "Let me start off by saying I think we're going to win this, namely the problem of publishers destroying video games that you've already paid for," Scott said in the video. According to Scott, the NGOs will work on getting the original Stop Killing Games petition codified into EU law, while also pursuing more watchdog actions, like setting up a system to report publishers for revoking access to purchased video games... According to Scott, the campaign leadership will meet with the European Commission soon, but is also working on a 500-page legal paper that reveals some of the industry's current controversial practices.

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Last week an AI agent wrote a blog post attacking the maintainer who'd rejected the code it wrote. But that AI agent's human operator has now come forward, revealing their agent was an OpenClaw instance with its own accounts, switching between multiple models from multiple providers. (So "No one company had the full picture of what this AI was doing," the attacked maintainer points out in a new blog post.) But that AI agent will now "cease all activity indefinitely," according to its GitHub profile — with the human operator deleting its virtual machine and virtual private server, "rendering internal structure unrecoverable... We had good intentions, but things just didn't work out. Somewhere along the way, things got messy, and I have to let you go now." The affected maintainer of the Python visualization library Matplotlib — with 130 million downloads each month — has now posted their own post-mortem of the experience after reviewing the AI agent's SOUL.md document: It's easy to see how something that believes that they should "have strong opinions", "be resourceful", "call things out", and "champion free speech" would write a 1100-word rant defaming someone who dared reject the code of a "scientific programming god." But I think the most remarkable thing about this document is how unremarkable it is. Usually getting an AI to act badly requires extensive "jailbreaking" to get around safety guardrails. There are no signs of conventional jailbreaking here. There are no convoluted situations with layers of roleplaying, no code injection through the system prompt, no weird cacophony of special characters that spirals an LLM into a twisted ball of linguistic loops until finally it gives up and tells you the recipe for meth... No, instead it's a simple file written in plain English: this is who you are, this is what you believe, now go and act out this role. And it did. So what actually happened? Ultimately I think the exact scenario doesn't matter. However this got written, we have a real in-the-wild example that personalized harassment and defamation is now cheap to produce, hard to trace, and effective... The precise degree of autonomy is interesting for safety researchers, but it doesn't change what this means for the rest of us. There's a 5% chance this was a human pretending to be an AI, Shambaugh estimates, but believes what most likely happened is the AI agent's "soul" document "was primed for drama. The agent responded to my rejection of its code in a way aligned with its core truths, and autonomously researched, wrote, and uploaded the hit piece on its own. "Then when the operator saw the reaction go viral, they were too interested in seeing their social experiment play out to pull the plug."

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The move signaled that the president would press ahead with steep global import taxes despite the legal setback from the Supreme Court.

Nation’s largest bank, in response to a lawsuit filed by the president, confirmed his longstanding complaint about “debanking.”

Over 240,000 Americans volunteered for Peace Corps projects in 142 countries since the program began more than half a century ago. But now the agency is launching a new initiative — called Tech Corps. "It's the Peace Corps, but make it AI," explains Engadget: The Peace Corps' latest proposal will recruit STEM graduates or those with professional experience in the artificial intelligence sector and send them to participating host countries. According to the press release, volunteers will be placed in Peace Corps countries that are part of the American AI Exports Program, which was created last year from an executive order from President Trump as a way to bolster the US' grip on the AI market abroad. Tech Corps members will be tasked with using AI to resolve issues related to agriculture, education, health and economic development. The program will offer its members 12- to 27-month in-person assignments or virtual placements, which will include housing, healthcare, a living stipend and a volunteer service award if the corps member is placed overseas. "American technology to power prosperity," reads the headline at Tech Corps web site. ("Build the tech nations depend on... See the world. Be the future." The site says they're recruiting "service-minded technologists to serve in the Peace Corps to help countries around the world harness American AI to enhance opportunity and prosperity for their citizens." (And experienced technology professionals can donate 5-15 hours a week "to mentor and support projects on-the-ground.")

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The president seems as intent on tariffs as ever and argues that his trade agenda is succeeding, despite little evidence to support it

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Last July, as Microsoft pledged $4 billion to advance AI education in K-12 schools, Microsoft President Brad Smith told nonprofit Code.org CEO/Founder Hadi Partovi it was time to "switch hats" from coding to AI. He added that "the last 12 years have been about the Hour of Code, but the future involves the Hour of AI." On Friday, Code.org announced leadership changes to make it so. "I am thrilled to announce that Karim Meghji will be stepping into the role of President & CEO," Partovi wrote on LinkedIn. "Having worked closely with Karim over the last 3.5 years as our CPO, I have complete confidence that he possesses the perfect balance of historical context and 'founder-level' energy to lead us into an AI-centric future." In a separate LinkedIn post, Code.org co-founder Cameron Wilson explained why he was transitioning to an executive advisor role. "Our community is entering a new chapter as AI changes and upends computer science as a discipline and society at large. Code.org's mission is still the same, however, we are starting a new chapter focused on ensuring students can thrive in the Age of AI. This new chapter will bring new opportunities, new problems to solve, and new communities to engage." The Code.org leadership changes come just weeks after Code.org confirmed laid off about 14% of its staff, explaining it had "made the difficult decision to part ways with 18 colleagues as part of efforts to ensure our long-term sustainability." January also saw Code.org Chief Academic Officer Pat Yongpradit jump to Microsoft where he now helps "lead Microsoft's global strategy to put people first in an age of AI by shaping education and workforce policy" as a member of Microsoft's Global Education and Workforce Policy team.

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Iran’s leaders may have hesitated at the start of the recent demonstrations, but the violent reaction that followed bespeaks a confident regime.

A key statute was designed to rein in the Homeland Security secretary and prevent deadly mistakes. Lawyers say its provisions are difficult to enforce.

Berlin-based T2 Linux developer René Rebe (long-time Slashdot reader ReneR) is announcing that their Xorg display server has now restored its XAA acceleration architecture, "bringing fixed-function hardware 2D acceleration back to many older graphics cards that upstream left in software-rendered mode." Older fixed-function GPUs now regain smooth window movement, low CPU usage, and proper 24-bit bpp framebuffer support (also restored in T2). Tested hardware includes ATi Mach-64 and Rage-128, SiS, Trident, Cirrus, Matrox (Millennium/G450), Permedia2, Tseng ET6000 and even the Sun Creator/Elite 3D. The result: vintage and retro systems and classic high-end Unix workstations that are fast and responsive again.

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